In today's corporate environment electronic mail (email) systems are being intensively used as the official communication tool. Emails are used to communicate with friends, relatives, colleagues and also officially being used to communicate with customers. Email attachment features are some of the most essential features in the emailing world and probably the most exploited feature. When using this feature, users can send all types and kind of file along with the email, by attaching the file in the email. These attachments are popularly known as Email Attachments. Email attachments are heavily being used for business interactions as well. Gaining such an importance, the completeness of the email system (including the Email attachment feature) to address all kind of possible scenarios becomes very vital. Below described is one such manifestation, which is vital, commonly encountered and still not addressed by any of the email systems.
In this world of emails there exists set of users who get a lot of email attachments (including me) representing design documents, pictures, movie clips, customer proposals etc. Most of us store these email attachments in our local computer hard disk (generally in “My documents” folder in the windows world) for a later access and reference. After saving the attachment in local hard disk some users may keep the attachment as-is in the email while some will delete it from the email copy. Later (where later can be any amount of time period, can be 1 day or even 1 year or more) when the user refers to the detached email attachment lying on his/her hard-disk, many-a-times there is a need for the user “wanting to” or “having to” refer to the email from where this attachment was detached. In the current system either the user needs to remember/recollect as to who had send this email or when was it received etc and then keep digging his/her ever growing email archives to get hold of the email/email-chain/email-thread associated with that attachment. Many times this is a cumbersome process and if the email is about a year old or more then it becomes even more difficult to locate the email associated with the attachment. An actual user's personal experience is as follows: “A user was referring to a design document which the user had received a year back (as an email attachment) from someone in the AIX Security team (whose name/email ID the user could not recollect). The user vaguely remembered that the email associated with this attachment had some more information on the design, which was written as a part of the email text. There was a strong need for the user to refer to the email associated with the design document (email attachment) the user was referring to, as the user wanted to know who had send the attachment (who all wee in the cc list) and what was the additional design details mentioned in the email body. It took me about 15-20 minutes for the user to manually dig out that particular email (email-chain) from my every growing email archive. The process and time taken was pretty annoying and cumbersome.”
This scenario is a very frequently encountered scenario with most of the people where people want to refer to emails associated with the detached attachment, in later period of time. Hence there is a need to have a mapping between email attachments stored locally (on the personal PC) and the email/email-chain/email-thread it originated from, such that the user on a single click can open the email associated with the attachment he/she is referring to (irrespective of its age). The proposed solution in this disclosure addresses the stated problem elegantly and greatly enhances the user convenience of the system to locate and open email associated with the detached email attachment at a single click.
One could argue that one of the existing solutions is to use the search facility to find for the attachment name in the entire email archives But with large archives, this really is not so neat and consumes a lot of time (as in the above mentioned case, I did the same to locate the email). Also in cases where the user has manually edited/deleted the attachment from the emails, this particular solution does not work at all. Hence there is clearly a problem of user convenience, performance and reliability in this approach. Apart, there are many patents associated with the Management of Email and email attachment, but none of them address the stated problem. Following are few patents, which talk on email attachment and their management but do not qualify to be prior arts as they are addressing totally different problem (and do not address/cover the above stated problem at all).
U.S. Pat. No. 7,107,276 to Johnson describes a uniform identifier record has a unique identifier field and a textual identifier field. The unique identifier field may comprise a uniform resource locator. In one embodiment, adding a constant value to a last prior unique identifier creates the unique identifier. The textual information is a user-friendly string identifying the file. In applications where the file identified by the uniform identifier record is associated with a separate file, the uniform identifier record is appended to the associated file.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,113,948 to Jhingan et al. describes a file delivery system for transmitting files to recipients using email, which may be used with existing email infrastructures. High volumes of large file attachments may be handled by routing attachments independent of an associated email. An attachment distribution system extracts the attachments of emails at mail servers and routes them through a hosting server thereby alleviating server loading on the mail server. The system may be configured for delivery optimization, recipient authentication and delivery confirmation. The system examines emails flowing through a distributed network of mail servers, and may invoke attachment extraction based on configurable rules like attachment size and sender validity, and move the attachments over the Internet or Intranet to a remote server that is capable of delivering the attachments to the email recipients.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,155,481 to Prahlad et al. describes an e-mail management system that includes an e-mail browser having a time variance interface that provides for storage into a storage media of e-mail messages that have been received over time. The time variance interface of the e-mail browser also provides for retrieval, from the storage media, of the e-mail messages corresponding to a user specified date. The retrieved e-mail messages each include an indication of the presence of an accompanying attachment(s) in the e-mail message. An affirmative indication provides the user with an option of retrieving content of the attachment(s) from the storage media such that the e-mail browser only when specifically requested by the user retrieves the content of the attachment(s).
U.S. Patent Application No. 20060031309 to Luoffo et al describes a method for email attachment management. An email is received. The email is scanned to detect an attachment. If the email contains an attachment, the attachment is detached from the email. The detached attachment is stored in a storage location on a storage medium. The email is modified to include a link, the link at least identifying the storage location and the modified email is stored.
There remains a need for a method and system that has the capacity to identify and track email message attachments to the original message and location of the attachment document.